How This Founder Made $2,500,000 with Free Content
His story, 5 important lesson on content and early startup growth
The founder became a creator?
Now the face of the company, he had no intentions of becoming a content creator.
Slidebean was founded in 2014 by Jose Cayasso - aka Caya.
They use Ai to help users create slide decks with just a few clicks
So how did it all start?
P.S. stick around until the end to see if he recommends content for you👀
In 2014 they had a small blog with basic social media presence.
They shared articles and paid to boost them on social media.
The problem - it wasn’t sustainable.
They were making $1000/month at this point No campaign would acquire users for a profit/
So they pivoted with 2 key experiments:
1) Increase prices and eliminate monthly plans
2) Start running Google search ads
They needed to find a way to profitably grow. This is where everything changed
Lesson 1: Understand Unit Economics
They paid for Google search ads for related keywords
“Presentation software”
“Powerpoint alternative”
“Presentation design”
Then tracked visitors (Google Analytics) to see what they did on site They got signups, but low paid conversions.
Until they found something that clicked...
The term “pitch deck.”
This unblocked everything. With year plans at $120, for very $90 spent on paid ads produced 1 paid customer .
$30 profit immediately!
They only scaled once they had unit economics to back it up.
Lesson 2: Nothing good ever lasts
There were only so many searches for “pitch deck.”
Eventually no additional money would get more clicks.
They were already the 1st result in ads.
So they used a sneaky growth hack.
They launched a site called pitch deck examples and started running ads to it.
The combination of the 2 sites helped dominate paid search results.
This grew Slidebean to $20K in monthly subscriptions.
But they faced a new problem… There were no more searches to target
Their Ads had a 5-10% click through rate - meaning up to 10% of people searching clicked on their ads.
The other 90% looked to Google’s organic results But they were invisible on Google otherwise…
So they shifted the focus to SEO
Lesson 3: Know your audience
This part is CRUCIAL.
They only shifted to SEO once they had a SOLID understanding of their target audience.
Content marketing can be a huge waste if you get traffic but few conversions
Don’t produce content for the wrong audience.
Lesson 4: Double Down
They knew their audience (searching for pitch deck) were founders.
Once they made the decision to pursue content marketing, they went all in
2-3 articles/week
Pitch deck guides
Pitch deck templates
They paid to promote their content in the beginning.
If they just wrote articles on their small blog, nobody would see it.
They paid to get their content in front of people (who would actually read the content).
This is key, high bounce rates are bad for the algorithm. This is how they built authority on Google.
They did this for 11 months. All content made by Caya, before growing to 4 people A year later they had articles ranking for their top 1-3 keywords.
At this point they had enough organic traffic to stop paying for ads Slidebean grew to
10,000 customers
$1M annual revenue
Lesson 5: Youtube is Powerful
The second largest search engine in the world.
They first started creating video versions of their blog posts, but those failed Tried interviews, a sitcom, tech/design review series (all didn’t worked).
In October 2018, they found their format.
It was Caya, reading in front of a teleprompter, in front of a greens screen, with some cool graphics.
They found 3 types of videos that worked best, each having a recognizable thumbnail
Startup 101
Pitch deck breakdowns
5 minute tech breakdowns
They created 2 videos/week.
Results?
340K+ subscribers
11M views in 2021
1M hours watch time
161M+ impressions
Average CTR 4% - $50,637 directly from youtube ads
Revenue per thousand video views - 4.05rpm
20k views 24 hours after publish is expected
Pretty impressive…
BONUS
Is content right for you?
Caya recommends not doing content as your first strategy.
It’s expensive, time consuming, involves a lot of trial and error.
He says your company SHOULD do content marketing once you figure out:
Unit economics
Your perfect audience
The preferred types of content they consume
Then double down for consistent organic traffic overtime once you find your winning formula (format, platform, etc)
S/O Slidebean
Checkout Slidebean.com to create powerful presentation with just a few clicks, powered by artificial intelligence.
In my opinion, the best platform for pitch decks out there (hands down).
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